


River Deep, Mountain High

by leiascully



Category: Bitterblue - Kristin Cashore, Seven Kingdoms Trilogy - Kristin Cashore
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Mentors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:39:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Bitterblue, Katsa will always be as big as a mountain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	River Deep, Mountain High

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suth/gifts).



To Bitterblue, Katsa will always be as big as a mountain. 

She still dreams of their trek through Grella's Pass sometimes. Never nightmares - the dreams comfort her, despite the fact they nearly died. She is half-conscious, half-frozen, but safe, so safe in the pack on Katsa's back, rocked by the rhythm of Katsa's pounding feet, as snow sifts around them. The fog of hunger and cold in her mind is much, much better than the fog of misremembering.

Katsa is there. Bitterblue is safe. The words pulse in her mind to the beat of her heart and the thud of Katsa's feat. Katsa is there. Bitterblue is safe. The wind ruffles the half-tanned furs that cover her. Water sloshes weakly in the flask tucked inside Bitterblue's clothes. She sucks at a fragment of dried meat. Katsa's breath makes a white cloud barely visible through the drifting snow. Her hands fumble back to cup Bitterblue's feet, and Bitterblue flexes her toes as best she can to reassure Katsa. She is not dead. Things could be worse. The world is shades of white and flashes of grey, and Bitterblue has no idea where they are going or how much farther they will need to go, but things could certainly be worse. Katsa is there. Bitterblue is safe. She tucks her face into the tangle of hair at the nape of Katsa's neck and melts the frost with her breath. Katsa is there, forever, like the mountains under their feet, like the snow, like the wind, like the cold. Bitterblue is safe.

In her sleep, the little queen pulls the covers tightly around herself, but she is smiling. Her feet shift under the duvet and then still. The embers in the fireplace settle with a whisper. 

\+ + + +

Bitterblue knows when Katsa is coming. It's as if she can scent Katsa on the air. She stands at the edge of her courtyard, watching the rain pour down and the tiled fish glisten, half-listening to Thiel. A sudden wind whips water into their faces. 

"Katsa," Bitterblue says, without really meaning to. But then the word fills her up. Her bones tingle. Her blood rushes. _Katsa._

"I beg your pardon, Your Majesty?" Thiel says.

"Katsa is coming," Bitterblue says, turning her face into the breeze. Tiny droplets catch on the tips of her eyelashes. She squints and sees the world refracted. 

"Have you received notice of this?" Thiel asks. "I was not aware that you had been brought word of a visit."

Bitterblue ignores him. At fifteen, she has learned to ignore a great deal of what Thiel says. Some part of Thiel is gone, or lost, or hidden. She is not sure, when he disappears from his own eyes, whether he is seeking that lost portion or hiding from the memory of it. She has learned she must treat him gently, but she doesn't have the patience for that now, with the rain falling and the fish swimming and Katsa out there somewhere, approaching. 

"Have her usual rooms prepared," she tells Thiel. "She'll be here. What were you saying?"

"The idea of allowing townships to secede from their lords and govern themselves independently," Thiel says. "Rood thinks…"

Bitterblue waves one hand. She can't think of governing now. Repairing the damage that her father did to her country will take much longer than the ten or fifteen minutes more of this conversation that she can bear. Her mind is full of Katsa. She can hardly help it. Katsa is everything. Katsa is life itself. There is no one anywhere as alive as Katsa is. She's at least six times as alive as Thiel is, with his dry voice and his distant eyes. The only person nearly as alive as Katsa is Po, and Bitterblue thinks he's soaked up Katsa somehow, that he's been infused by her essence over the years.

Bitterblue is restless suddenly. She wants to run into the courtyard and fling herself through the fountain, sending up spray and soaking her dress. She wants to have her horse brought around so that she can gallop hard across the countryside. She wants to sweep every piece of paper off her desk in the tower or jump on the downy cushion of her bed. She wants to climb a mountain and fill her lungs with brisk pine-scented air until she feels her skin will burst. Katsa is coming, and she will bring the summer with her.

There is a letter waiting for her later, after she has endured Thiel and the rest of them, after dinner and the concert arranged in honor of her coming nameday. Bitterblue is glad she didn't know about the letter before - she never could have sat through any of it, otherwise. Helda hands it to her as she takes down Bitterblue's hair to braid it for the night. Bitterblue opens the letter carefully. It's ciphered, of course, but she's used to that now. She's always had a gift for ciphers. 

"I'll be there for your nameday," Katsa wrote in her scrawl, and the sight of her unshapely letters comforts Bitterblue's eyes. Bitterblue, thinking of her own penmanship lessons, wonders how long it took for Katsa's writing to reach this level. Even the letters are vibrant. The page hardly seems able to contain them. "More when I see you," the message continues.

Bitterblue can't wait. She wakes up four or five times in the night and rushes to the window, but there are only stars. And somewhere out under the stars, Katsa.

\+ + + + 

Helda is the one who taught Bitterblue about her bleeding and the changes her body would go through. Katsa taught her swordplay, how to defend herself, how to understand the ways that people would look at her, and especially the ways that men would look at her. Helda clucked her tongue as she mended Bitterblue's gowns and watched them spar. 

"Tell her the whole truth of it," she said to Katsa, who was standing fresh and firm as Bitterblue panted and leaned on the hilt of her sword. 

"Of what?" Katsa asked. "The behavior of men?"

"There will be men who look at her and don't seek to conquer her," Helda said, sounding loving and scolding at the same time. "Or women. She can't greet every smile with a punch."

"It's always worked for me," Katsa deadpanned.

Helda snorted. "It will come more easily from you than from me. You're young enough for starry eyes and pounding hearts."

Katsa rolled her eyes. "There isn't anything anything I can tell her that you couldn't. In fact, I'm sure you could tell her more."

"Nevertheless," Helda said, her embroidery needle flashing as it dipped in and out of the fabric. "If you're telling her when to defend herself, you might as well tell her what to do when she doesn't wish to defend herself."

And so Katsa had told her, and Bitterblue had listened in a sort of fascinated revulsion, her shyness changing gradually to interest. Now, three years later, she understands a little better, but most of it is still unknown to her, part of that vital space that Katsa occupies. She will be sixteen this nameday, and the idea of the pursuit of a lover is just as abstract to her as the idea of the pursuit of a trout in a chilly river. Katsa may have the ability to hook a fish or a man with a crooked finger, but Bitterblue does not. 

She is especially glad for Katsa coming this year - her advisors have started to slip letters from suitors into her heaps of paperwork. Katsa will protect her from all of that. She has a wonderful excuse if Katsa is around. Bitterblue can't possibly entertain suitors if she's entertaining the partner of her cousin, a dangerous revolutionary. Men will skirt her table as long as she's speaking to the disinherited lady of the Midlands with her mismatched eyes - they fear Katsa and her reputation - and Bitterblue will be left in peace.

She longs for peace. Peace like the calm of a world made of ice (deadly, except for Katsa's strength and will). Peace like the first bite of bread after weeks of unsalted jerky and shriveled, frozen winterberries. Peace like warm hands rubbing her cold feet. Peace like the first step downhill after years of toiling up and up and up.

Bitterblue takes a pinch of the tender skin of her wrist between her fingers to shake herself from her reverie. Her flight from Monsea, gripping Katsa's shoulders, wasn't peaceful; it's only that it was less complicated. Every choice had a simple option: live or die. Now she has so many choices, all of them apparently urgent and none of them easy. 

She is grateful for her palace, for her soft bed, for the quantities of food on her table. Many of her people have less. But it was easier, in a way, in the woods, in the snow. It was easier when there was Katsa. But Katsa was made for the fight, not the throne - she'd be the first to say it. Katsa hates choices that aren't black and white. Katsa sees right and wrong and acts. She distills everything down to its essence in a way Bitterblue will never be able to, not with Thiel's solemn presence at her elbow and the weight of an entire kingdom on her shoulders, fractured but hopeful.

It is the hope that is the heaviest. But she would not give her Monsea up for the world.

Bitterblue sighs and tears her eyes away from the window, focusing on Runnemood, who gives her a tentative smile. She smiles back, waiting. 

\+ + + + 

Bitterblue waits, biting her lip when her breathing gets too fast with anticipation and she lose track of what her advisors are saying. She governs. She is queen. She is queenly, or at least as queenly as a small fifteen-year-old can be. She feels less queenly now than she did at ten, now that she has begun to fill out her gowns (Helda may have been a bit overly generous with some of the proportioning) and now that she is overtaken at times by fits of pique, stomping away down the steps of the tower, away from her dry old men and their dry old opinions. But none of that will matter once Katsa arrives. 

She is occupied when Katsa does arrive - her sweet dream of seeing Katsa's horse coming over the hill was nothing but a dream - but she hears the clatter of hooves on the bridge all the way from the tower.

"Excuse me," she says to her advisors, lifting the hem of her gown as she stands and hurling herself down the narrow stairs. She nearly topples a maid - one of the new ones, Fox, who is Graced with fearlessness and is unexpectedly descending a ladder as Bitterblue rounds a corner. She skids down the corridors of the palace and into the courtyard, where Katsa is dismounting and handing her reins to a stable boy. Katsa turns at the sound of Bitterblue's rushing footsteps and holds open her arms with a wide smile bright in her sun-browned face. Bitterblue flings herself into Katsa's arms. She rests her head against Katsa's chest, hearing the steady thud of Katsa's heart. Katsa's arms are strong and her legs are rooted, connected to the ground underneath the cobbles of the courtyard. Her veins are the rivers, her skin is the earth - Bitterblue half-believes Katsa could coax a seed into sprouting just by cupping it in her hands and breathing on it.

"How long are you staying?" Bitterblue asks, her lips almost brushing Katsa's neck, afraid of the answer.

"As long as you need me," Katsa says, and smiles again, and her face is the sun and her eyes are the sky.

_Katsa is here. Bitterblue is safe._

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is from the Céline Dion song - I make no apologies for that ;)


End file.
